The Hall of Falling Petals was beautiful, and Bai Yunzhao had never once been comfortable in it.

It stood at the head of Qingyun Pavilion's main terrace, open on three sides, so that the peach orchard of the valley breathed straight into the room. Even now, in the last cold weeks of the year, the early trees were showing a pink haze at the tips of their branches, and now and then a loose petal drifted in across the polished floor. Someone had always swept them up, in Yunzhao's childhood. No one swept them up now. Since the old master died, the pavilion had grown careless about small things and ruthless about large ones.

He knelt at the center of the floor with his back straight and his hands resting loosely on his thighs, and he smiled.

It was a very good smile. He had spent twenty years refining it. It showed exactly the right amount of teeth, tilted the corners of his eyes just enough to look warm, and could be held for an hour without so much as a tremor. It had gotten him out of trouble with a dozen elders and into a dozen kitchens. It was his oldest and most reliable piece of equipment, rather better than his sword.

"You understand the honour of it," said Elder Fen.

There were three of them behind the long table. Elder Fen sat in the center, silver-haired, with a face as smooth and unreadable as a river stone. The other two, as always, kept their eyes on her to learn what to feel.

"Entirely," Yunzhao said warmly. "The Pavilion has chosen me to stand for it before the red candles. I am overwhelmed."

"The swords chose you," Elder Fen corrected.

"Of course. The swords, who are famously discerning." His smile did not move. "May I ask a small thing? I am told the bearer of Hanxue will be Ling Shuohan of Hanjian. I fought him once. He seems the sort of man who would take a vow very seriously. Has anyone told him the rest of us are mostly improvising?"

One of the other elders coughed into his sleeve. Elder Fen did not blink.

"You will conduct yourself with dignity."

"I will conduct myself with so much dignity that Hanjian will weep."

"Yunzhao."

He let his shoulders ease a half-inch, which was as much as he allowed himself. "Yes, Elder."

He knew precisely what he was. Not the honoured bearer. Not the Pavilion's chosen blade. He was the one disciple who could be spared. Who had no family to complain, and no powerful uncle to petition, and no great ambition that the elders would miss. A foundling picked up from the roadside at the age of six, who had owed his life to the old master and had never once been allowed to forget it. If the rite succeeded, the Pavilion would be freed of a curse. If it failed, the Pavilion would be freed of him.

He bowed, and his hand drifted, quite without his permission, to the red silk tassel that hung from the hilt of Taoying. He wound it once around his finger and let it unwind. Wound it. Let it go.

When he looked up, Elder Fen was watching his hand.

He rode out of the valley at dawn the next day with a single bag and a borrowed horse, and for the first hour he thought about nothing at all.

Then, because the road ran north along the same ridges, because the wind came down off the border with the same particular edge, and because his mind had never in its life been obedient, he thought about Wolf's Gate.

He had been twenty. He had been sent to the pass as a make-weight, one of a half-dozen disciples who would stand behind the champion and look suitably grave. Then the champion had come down with a fever the night before, and the elders had looked around the room with the faces of men counting spare coins, and their eyes had landed on him.

He had expected to lose. He had planned to lose gracefully, which in his experience was almost the same as winning. Then he had stood in the black rock of the pass in the wind and looked across at the man from Hanjian, and had forgotten, briefly, what the plan was.

Tall. Dark-eyed. Very still. He had a way of holding his sword as if it were a sentence he had decided to finish, and a face that gave away absolutely nothing, and Yunzhao, who made a living reading faces, had felt something like vertigo. He wanted to know what was going on behind it. He wanted it with an embarrassing intensity.

So he had fought. Forty exchanges, each one a question. The man from Hanjian answered every one of them without wasting a single motion, and somewhere around the thirtieth Yunzhao had begun to laugh out of pure helpless delight, because it was like pushing against a mountain and discovering that the mountain pushed back.

On the forty-first he let himself be pinned. It was not hard. He had stopped wanting to win some time ago. He looked up into that cold, intent, astonished face and said the first thing that came into his head, and bowed, and left.

The petal he had done on impulse. He had been carrying one in his sleeve, a habit from childhood, a sort of luck. On the way past the other man's sword, on the way into his bow, he had tucked it under the hilt cord, thinking: so you will remember me.

He had not thought it would be the whole of what the man remembered.

It had been the single most foolish thing he had ever done, and he had spent six years not regretting it.

By noon the road had gone to snow, and the horse had begun to give him reproachful looks. He dismounted and walked beside it for a while, hands tucked into his sleeves, and made himself think about the part of the plan that mattered.

The rite was a farce. He had decided that years ago. Not the curse. The curse was real enough; he had watched it unpick the old master over a single bitter winter, stone by stone, until a man who had once split a boulder with two fingers could not lift a teacup. What he did not believe was the story the elders told afterward. A sickness of the blade, a flaw in the old forging, tragic and nobody's fault. He had sat at the old master's bedside for the last nine nights. The old man had not been confused. In the last hour he had gripped Yunzhao's wrist with a strength he should not have had left, and said, very quietly, "Do not let them tell you it was only the sword."

Then he had died. And nobody had asked Yunzhao what the old man had said, because nobody had thought to.

He had spent three years trying to find out what was meant. It was not easy. The forge-hall's records were kept in sealed rooms, and the sealed rooms were kept by the forge-hall, and Qingyun disciples were not welcome at the forge-hall's doors. Then, eight months ago, a quiet rumor had reached him: that the officiant of the rite, whoever that turned out to be, would keep a lodge on the boundary line, and that the lodge, which was older than either sect, still held a small archive of its own. Papers about the swords. Papers nobody on either side had bothered to read since the founding.

It was thin. It was a rumor. But it was a door, and he had been standing outside doors for a very long time.

So he had said yes. Not because the swords chose him. Because the swords had put him, at last, inside the house.

He glanced northward, toward the white line of Hanjian's ridge on the horizon. Cold and clean and entirely unapproachable. He was fairly certain that the man who lived beneath it hated him with great and specific passion, for a flower and for a dead teacher and for being from the wrong valley. He was fairly certain that this would make things difficult.

He was also, if he was honest, fairly certain that he was looking forward to it.

"Terrible," he told the horse. "I know."

Chiyan Lodge stood on the boundary road exactly halfway between the two sects, which meant that nobody had ever wanted to claim it. It was a long, low building of grey fieldstone with a steep roof of slate shingles, built into the lee of a rock outcrop to shelter it from the north wind. Smoke rose from one chimney. A string of faded red lanterns, left over from some previous occasion, swayed gently under the eaves, and beside the well in the yard stood a single old peach tree, bare and black, with the first swollen buds of the thaw sitting on its twigs like tiny closed fists.

And in front of the lodge, in the snow, with his back to the road and his sword on his hip, stood Ling Shuohan.

Yunzhao stopped the horse.

It was ridiculous. He knew exactly who it was. He had known all week that it would be this man, and he had practiced a number of opening lines on the road. None of them survived the sight of that straight back and that high black ponytail, held with a single silver pin, against the white. Shuohan wore the deep blue of Hanjian with gold along the collar, and his stillness was so complete that the snow had gathered undisturbed on his shoulders. He looked less like a man waiting for someone than like a part of the landscape that had decided to be annoyed.

Yunzhao slid off the horse, handed the reins to a stable boy who had appeared from nowhere, and walked up the path with his best smile in place.

"You are early," said Shuohan, without turning around.

"And you," said Yunzhao, "have been standing here a very long time. There is frost on your eyebrows."

The man turned.

Six years had made no difference. The same dark, level eyes, grey with a faint wash of blue, like a winter lake. The same face that gave nothing away. If anything it was harder now, sharper along the jaw and the cheek, with faint shadows beneath the eyes that spoke of poor sleep. He was taller than Yunzhao remembered. He looked at Yunzhao the way a man looks at a ledger in which he has discovered an error.

A breeze came down off the rocks and rattled the bare branches of the old peach tree. One of the buds, coaxed open too early by the thaw, let go of a single pale petal, and it spun lazily across the yard, past the lantern strings, and landed on Shuohan's shoulder.

They both looked at it.

The silence went on for what felt like a minute. Yunzhao could think of nothing at all to say. Shuohan raised one gloved hand, very slowly, and flicked the petal off his sleeve as if it were a spider.

"I did not do that," Yunzhao said.

"I did not say that you did."

"You thought it very loudly."

"Let us dispense with it," Shuohan said. His voice was low and even, with a faint roughness in it, as if he had not spoken in a while. "You know who I am. I know who you are. Neither of us wishes to be here."

"I would not go so far as to say that." Yunzhao spread his hands. "I was told there would be tea."

"There will be a hundred nights."

"That is a great deal of tea."

A muscle moved in Shuohan's jaw. It was the first thing he had given away, and Yunzhao felt a small bright pleasure at having found it. "This is not a matter for humor."

"Everything is a matter for humor, if you are brave enough." He tilted his head. "Come, Ling Shuohan. We are going to be sharing a roof. I would rather start with a joke than a funeral."

He saw it land. He saw something behind the grey eyes flinch at the word funeral, quick and carefully closed, like a hand drawn back from a flame. It was gone before he could name it. But he had seen a man kneeling in the snow once, a long time ago, in the blue hours before dawn, and he had never forgotten what that stillness looked like. He knew the word had touched it.

He felt his smile slip by half a degree, and caught it, and put it back.

"I did not think I would see you again," Shuohan said abruptly.

"Nor I you."

"It is regrettable."

"Is it?"

Shuohan did not answer. He took one step closer, which brought him into the space Yunzhao usually reserved for friends and rivals, and looked down. He was not trying to intimidate. It was simpler than that: he was looking for something, and he intended to be thorough. His voice, when it came, was very quiet.

"I do not trust you."

The smile held. It held beautifully. Yunzhao felt it hold the way a bridge holds under a load it was not built for.

"Good," he said lightly. "Then it is fair."

"Fair."

"I do not trust you either. You hold a sword like a man with something to prove, you have not blinked in nearly a minute, and your sect has been telling stories about mine for years. If we began by trusting each other I would worry that one of us was a fool." He smiled, and for a moment, just one, it was almost a real one. "This is much better. I always prefer honest enemies to dishonest friends."

Shuohan looked at him for another long breath. Then he made a small sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a scoff, but lived near both.

"Do not think that I will make it easy."

"I would be disappointed if you did."

It happened by accident. A gust caught Yunzhao's sleeve and he leaned in to shake the snow from it, which brought his face close enough to Shuohan's to notice that the tips of the man's ears, just visible beneath the black line of his hair, had turned a clear pale red.

It was not the cold. The rest of him was frost-white.

Yunzhao stared at it with real fascination. He had been trying to find a crack in this man for the better part of ten minutes, with wit and with wicked intent, and the crack had turned out to be this: that Ling Shuohan, who had faced him down in a pass full of witnesses without a flicker, went red to the ears when someone stood too close.

He wanted, very badly, to say something.

He did not. He stepped back, brushed his sleeve, and was annoyed, a moment later, to find his own pulse running a little quicker than the occasion deserved. It was a very small thing to notice. He did not know why he had noticed it. He would have preferred, on the whole, not to have.

"What?" said Shuohan, who had seen him staring.

"Nothing."

"You are smiling."

"I am always smiling. It is a medical condition."

He turned away to give himself a second, and found, as he did, that the whole length of the lodge's grey wall was lit softly from within, as if someone had begun to light the lamps. A figure stood framed in the doorway, in dark red silk, arms folded and one shoulder propped against the frame in an attitude of theatrical patience.

"Are the two of you quite finished?" said Gu Chiyan.

Yunzhao sketched a bow. "We are only just getting acquainted."

"I could hear." The young man in the doorway came down the two shallow steps into the lantern light, arms still folded across a chest embroidered in gold thread with cranes and clouds, and surveyed them both with the expression of a man watching two cats circle a bag of fish. He could not have been much past thirty. His hair was tied back with a red cord, his eyes were bright and long and entirely too amused, and when he unfolded his arms he took up from a stand by the door a lacquer tray on which lay two slim red candles, unlit, thick as a man's wrist and the length of a forearm.

Behind him the lodge doors stood open on a warm room. A table. A fire. The smell of cedar and old paper and tea.

"Gu Chiyan," he said, with a small, ironic nod toward each of them in turn. "Your officiant, your host, and for the next hundred nights your only witness. You will be glad of me. Everyone else will be a good deal further away." He lifted the tray an inch. In the lantern glow the candles gleamed like two fresh wounds. "Now. I am told that neither of you has slept properly in a month, that you hold a decided opinion of one another, and that you have not eaten. All of that can be remedied. But first, I am afraid, there is paperwork."

He turned and walked back up the steps.

"Come inside. Sit down." His voice drifted back over his shoulder, light and merry and quite impossible to refuse. "I will read you the terms."

Yunzhao looked at Shuohan. Shuohan, very stiffly, looked back.

Neither of them moved for a moment. A single peach petal, the last of the thaw, spun down between them in the lantern light and settled in the snow.

Then Yunzhao smiled, a small real thing that surprised him, and went up the steps first.